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Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Joan Didion

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Joan Didion
Age: 89
Born: 1934
Born: December 5
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Sacramento
California
Even
Five
Rewriting
Every
Start
Fifty
Back
Page
Might
Twenty
Need
Twenties
Feel
Pages
Feels
Hundred
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I learned early to keep death in my line of sight, keep it under surveillance, keep it on cleared ground and away from any brush where it might coil unnoticed.
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If you aren't aware of the reader, you're working in a vacuum.
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We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images.
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It Was Once Suggested to Me that, as an Antidote to Crying, I Put My Head in a Paper Bag.
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Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be.
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In terms of work, I never felt that I've done it right. I always want to have done it differently, to have done it better, a different way.
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On the August night in 1933 when General Gerardo Machado, then president of Cuba, flew out of Havana into exile, he took with him five revolvers, seven bags of gold, and five friends, still in their pajamas.
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I didn’t like it [computer] when I first began using it. Where it’s helped me a lot is in nonfiction which is a kind of different process. You’ve got research, you’ve got your notes, You can block out what you want to work on for the next 10 pages and put it in another file, and then you can kind of carve it into shape
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I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say or do comes to me as naturally as breathing.
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It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. ... The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
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Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
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I have always wanted a swimming pool and never had one.
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I recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. Like, I lose my temper a lot and I become unhinged and kind of hysterical.
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I don't know what I think until I write it down.
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What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
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The fear is for what is still to be lost.
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The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle.
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A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.
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The apparent ease of California life is an illusion, and those who believe the illusion will live here in only the most temporary way.
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Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.
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